Scribble, Scribble, Eh, Mr. Toad?

By LANCE MORROW

National Handwriting Day passed last month without parades. But the occasion may deserve to be celebrated, belatedly, with an updating of a part of The Wind in the Willows, a new chapter in the life of Toad of Toad Hall:

Toad gave up pen and pencil years ago, when he discovered the Smith-Corona manual portable typewriter. Toad loved his Smith-Corona. He played upon it like a flamboyant pianist. Now he massaged the keyboard tenderly through a quiet phrase, now he banged it operatically, thundering along to the chinging bell at the end of the line, where his left arm would abruptly fire into midair with a flourish and fling home the carriage return.

If Toad ever put pen to paper, it was reluctantly, to scribble in the margin of a college textbook ("Hmmmmm" or "Sez who?" or "Ha!"), or to write a check. Over the years, Toad's handwriting atrophied, until it was almost illegible. Who cared? Sonatas of language, symphonies, flowed from the Smith-Corona.

At length, Toad moved on to an electric model, an IBM Selectric, and grew more rapturous still. Toad said the machine was like a small private printing press: the thoughts shot from his brain through his fingers and directly into flawless print.

Then one winter afternoon, Toad came upon the marvel that changed his life forever. Toad found the word processor. It was to his Selectric as a Ferrari to a gypsy's cart. Toad now thought that his old writing machines were clattering relics of the Industrial Revolution.

Toad processed words like a demon. His fingers flew across the keys, and the words arrayed themselves on a magic screen before him. Here was a miracle that imitated the very motions of his brain, that teleported paragraphs here and there--no, there!--as quickly as a mind flicking through alternatives. Prose with the speed of light, and lighter than air! Toad could lift 10 lbs. of verbiage, at a whim, from his first page and transport it to the last, and then (hmmm), back again.

A happy life, until one day, Toad, when riding his bicycle in the park, took a disastrous spill. Left thumb broken, arm turned to fossil in a cast, out of which his fingers twiddled uselessly, Toad faced the future. He tried one-handing his word processor, his hand jerking over the keyboard like a chicken in a barnyard.

It was no use. There is no going back in pleasure. "Bother!" said Toad. He picked up a No. 1 Eberhard Faber pencil. He eyed it with the despair of a suddenly toothless gourmand confronting a life of strained carrots and peas. He found a schoolboy's lined notebook and started to write.

The words came haltingly, in misshapen clusters. Toad's fingers lunged and jabbed and oversteered. When he paused to reread a sentence, he found that he could not decipher it. The language came out Etruscan.

Yet Toad perforce persisted. It had been years since he had formally and respectfully addressed blank paper with only pen or pencil in hand. He felt unarmed, vulnerable. He thought of final exams long years ago--the fields of rustling blue-book pages, the universal low, frantic scratching of pens, the smell of sour collegiate anguish.

Toad drove his pencil onward. Grudgingly, he thought, This is rather interesting. His handwriting, spasmodic at first, began to settle after a time into rhythmic, regular strokes, growing stronger, like an oarsman on a long haul.

Words come differently this way, thought Toad. To write a word is to make a thought an object. A thought flying around like electrons in the atmosphere of the brain suddenly coalesces into an object on the page (or computer screen). But when written in longhand, the word is a differently and more personally styled object than when it is arrayed in linear file, each R like every other R. It is not an art form, God knows, in Toad script, not Japanese calligraphy. Printed (typed) words march in uniform, standardized, cloned shapes done by assembly line. But now, thought Toad, as I write this down in pencil, the words look like ragtag militia, irregulars shambling across the page, out of step, slovenly but distinctive.

Toad reflected. What he saw on the penciled page was himself, all right, not just the content of the words but the physical shape and flow of thought. Some writers do not like to see so much of themselves on the page and prefer to objectify the words through a writing machine. Toad for a moment accused himself of sentimentalizing handwriting, as if it were home-baked bread or hand-cranked ice cream. He accused himself of erecting a cathedral of enthusiasm around his handicap.

At length Toad could see his own changes of mood in the handwriting. He could read haste when he had hurried. He thought that handwriting would make a fine lie-detector test, or a foolproof drunkometer. Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.

Writing in longhand does change one's style, Toad came to believe, a subtle change, of pace, of rhythm. Sentences in longhand seemed to take on some of the sinuosities of script. As he read his pages, Toad considered: The whole toad is captured here. L'ecriture, c'est l'homme (Handwriting is the man). Or: L'ecriture c'est le crapaud (Handwriting is the toad). What collectors pay for is the great writer's manuscript, the relic of his actual touch, like a saint's bone or lock of hair. What will we pay in future years for a great writer's computer printouts? All the evidence of his emendations, his confusions and moods, will have vanished into hyperspace, shot there by the Delete key.

Toad found himself seduced, in love, scribbling away in the transports of a new passion. Toad was always a fanatic, of course, an absolutist. He bought the fanciest fountain pen. His word processor went first into a corner, then into a closet with the old IBM.

Toad thought of Henry James. For decades, James wandered Europe and the U.S., staying in hotels or in friends' houses. He was completely mobile. He needed only pen and paper to write his usual six hours a day. Then in middle age, he got writer's cramp. He bought a typewriter, and, of course, needed a servant to operate the thing. So now James was more and more confined to his home in Sussex, pacing the room, dictating to the typist and the clacking machine. James became a prisoner of progress.

Toad, liberated, bounded off in the other direction. Light of heart, he took to the open road, encumbered by nothing heavier than a notebook and a pen. Pausing on a hilltop now and then, he wrote long letters to Ratty and Mole, and folded them into the shape of paper airplanes, and sent them sailing off on the breeze.